China's Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, its largest AI model at 2.4 trillion parameters, on August 3, sending its shares higher; simultaneously DeepSeek released V4-Flash, priced at more than 100 times below comparable Anthropic models according to analyst research; the two launches on the same day represent opposite strategies among Chinese AI firms: scale on capability versus slashing inference costs
China's Alibaba Group runs the Qwen LLM family, the most-downloaded Chinese open-weight model series, shaping the global open-vs-closed AI frontier debate.
full dossier ›Eight AI labs, split across the US, Europe and China, are writing the capability ceiling for the technology reshaping global industry and statecraft.
China's Zhejiang capital is the country's second-largest technology cluster after Beijing, anchored by Alibaba and now producing a new generation of global AI and robotics firms.
28.8 million fraudulent exchanges through 25,000 fake accounts extracted Claude's software-engineering and agentic-reasoning capabilities for Alibaba's Qwen lab
A 1M-token sparse-attention model lands above GPT-5.5 on its own coding benchmark, below Claude Opus 4.8, with weights still withheld
The 744B-parameter sparse MoE model with a real 1M-token context tops SWE-bench Pro among open-weight models and undercuts frontier closed-weight pricing sharply; MIT licence removes every regional restriction
DeepSeek and Qwen keep open models near-frontier and cheap; Meta and Alibaba keep their best tiers proprietary
Qwen3.7-Max and the cheaper Qwen3.7-Plus agent variant are proprietary; the open Qwen 3.6 line stays on Apache 2.0
V4-Pro at 1.6T params (49B active) and V4-Flash at 284B, both 1M-context, released open-weight on Hugging Face